Created Web Scraping Software to generate Blogs
by Chris PowerI am trying to create a newsletter for Real Estate Investing and Property Management. The problem is: I have to accomplish this part-time while I work full time, and raise my newborn twins with my wife.
To create a ton of content for my newsletter, I decided the best route was to make a news aggregate style newsletter -- similar to a lot of programming newsletters out there. To create this news aggregate, I needed to get sources for my blog content.
I spent time researching, and found a few websites I liked that had regularly updated blog content in the Real Estate Investing and Property Management world. I created some scripts in Node that would parse these websites, and output some HTML so I can copy+paste them into my blog, and send them out via newsletter.
This has worked better than I thought. I now have 5-6 websites I can scrape, and I output the HTML in a format that can be completely copy+pasted into wordpress. The whole process to generate a new post takes me maybe 20 minutes per week.
Coming up, I need to create my blog on wordpress, and find people to subscribe to my newsletter!
